


He Passed Us

by Nourgelitnius (Ladysarah)



Category: The Expanse (TV), The Expanse Series - James S. A. Corey
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, Just this once everyone lives, Seriously people, also muss is following book muss more than show muss, because we never got enough of these two, cause that's who was in my head when I started this all the way back in JANUARY, leviathan wakes ending spoilers, well almost everyone lives
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-14
Updated: 2016-08-14
Packaged: 2018-08-08 16:34:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,839
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7765108
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ladysarah/pseuds/Nourgelitnius
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>Venus</i>, he thinks as he puts her file back together for the night, discreetly slipping the new photo into his jacket as he walks away from his desk. Somehow comparing her to the Venus is comforting. Like she is made of stone and built to survive centuries and wars. Like they will find her.<br/><i>Where are you, Julie? Who did this to you?</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	He Passed Us

**Author's Note:**

> The title comes from the poem _Because I could not stop for Death_ by Emily Dickenson
> 
> I needed to play around with a universe where things turned out differently. Let me dream. 
> 
> I was going to put this in my [Tales from the Belt](http://archiveofourown.org/works/7690888) series, but clocking in at almost 4k words it felt like it had grown out of the small one-shot territory I had assigned to that work and deserved it's own place.

He’s on his third scotch of the night by the time he makes it to Julie Mao’s apartment. There is an officer stationed outside her building, too busy playing on his phone in his cruiser to pay attention to the drenched and drunk detective working his way into the building. Miller takes off his sopping hat before he flicks out his pocket knife and slices through the sticker connecting Julie’s front door to the frame, pushing the door open with the limited grace of a man who started the night not caring how drunk he was by the time he reached the end of it.

The apartment is as crummy as all the other apartments in the building. The carpet has seen years of stains somebody tried to wash away and the walls are a bright, sickly white that hurts his eyes if he stares at them for too long. A small living room, bedroom, kitchen, and bathroom. Everything is neat and orderly, each of her meager possessions in its place.

He doesn’t know what he’s looking for, yet. He’s hoping it will come to him. Will hit him so hard even his hung over brain will be able to remember it in the morning. Anything to help this case come together. Poor little heiress breaking free from her gilded cage only to fall into the hands of her captors.

Sure fingers run over the surfaces of her apartment. Bookcases, counters, shelves. A metal beaded necklace lays on her dresser, less tossed aside, more pondered over and repeatedly touched. Fretted over. He doesn't think twice before pocketing it. If he were soberer, he might question his reasoning, his interest in her life outside the facts necessary for the case. Instead, he moves back to her living room looking for more clues.

There are a few pictures hanging on her walls—not a single one of them family— and the certificates for earning first a purple, then a brown belt in Jiu Jitsu, the blanket still laying artfully over her sofa’s back.

He sits down with a sigh, bones giving a slight creak with each shift. Her laptop is slipped from the messenger bag he’s been hauling around and he opens it up, resting it on the clean coffee table in front of him. It blinks and beeps, waking slowly. The files are organized, almost obsessively so, files inside files inside files.

_Alright, Julie_ , he thinks as he opens the first folder. _What’s been on your mind?_

 

~

 

He’s been going through the missing person's folder for two months, pouring methodically over the facts from every angle he could think of. Her pocketed necklace is in hand, the silver beads rolling between his fingers like a stolen rosary, when he shifts in his seat and a picture he hasn’t seen before flutters out of the file and to the floor next to his desk, like a falling leaf. He’s been on shift for the last sixteen hours and is in need of a hard drink. He doesn’t want to pick it up but his fingers are already scratching the stained industrial carpet before he can think about it.

The picture is newer than most in his file, showing the matured face of a woman in her late-twenties as opposed to the fresh and innocent eighteen-year-old in most of the pictures provided by her family. Professionally taken, it looks like, and artsier than he usually pays attention to. She’s sinking into shadow, shoulders uneven, chin tucked to the side like the demure daughter the last two months of research has told him she was anything but. _Is_ anything but. Her eyes are downcast, her face soft, her neck arching and bare. Resigned, but graceful. The pose sticks in his mind as familiar and he can’t figure out why.

“That the Mao case?” Before he has time to put the photo away Muss is looking over his shoulder with a tsk-ing noise. “Beautiful girl. Kinda reminds me of The Venus.”

“The Venus?” He drops the photo onto his desk, casts the file aside, and gives the mouse a shake to wake up the sleepy computer screen.

“Yeah.” Muss sits at her desk, facing him. She looks almost as tired as he feels. He can’t imagine she’s been getting much more sleep than he has. Not with the riots going down all over town. “That statue without the arms? Di Milo or something.”

An image comes to mind of a statue he’d had to do a school report on when he was young and still optimistic about the world. Before he became a cop. Before he was forced to take out an abusive drug lord of a husband in front of the guy’s daughter.

_Venus_ , he thinks as he puts her file back together for the night, discreetly slipping the new photo into his jacket as he walks away from his desk. Somehow comparing her to the Venus is comforting. Like she is made of stone and built to survive centuries and wars. Like they will find her.

_Where are you, Julie? Who did this to you?_

 

~

 

The photo leads to a converted warehouse once owned by Scopuli Enterprises. It's full of wannabe activists hiding from people like him, trying to change the world with violent riots and questionable actions. It's their own private revolution.

It takes some threatening, some slamming a guy against a wall and showing off his gun—he should feel guiltier about this, right?—but eventually, he gets the information he needs. A code name they use to cover their tracks. From there it's only a matter of time before he finds the name checked into a motel a couple towns over, on the seedier side of the tracks.

Out of all the things he expected to find pulling up to the motel, a shootout was pretty low on the list. It takes moments to suss out started the dogfight, which side he wants to take, and from there it's over in minutes.

There's four of them picking themselves up and brushing off the dust. One with a noticeable Texan accent is coming out of the front office, bullet holes littering the wall and door.

Miller recognizes them pretty quickly: the lone survivors of a shipping freighter that was blown to dust in the Indian Ocean. The Canterbury. The leader, Holden, his face has been plastered on brick walls and fliers stuck to store fronts and light poles. His message looped on every news outlet from here to China vowing to get vengeance for the ship that killed his friends.

The question is, how does that lead them to the same hotel where his missing girl is holed away?

He can hear them chatting to themselves as he scours the shot up office for the room number he needs when it clicks.

“Lionel Polanski?”

They all still and turn to look at him, curiosity, and even hesitation, written on their faces.

“How do you know that name?”

He doesn't answer them, just takes off down the seedy hallway, eyes scanning room numbers until he finds the one he's looking for.

He's so close.

He's in over his head.

 

~

 

He can’t get the smell out of his mind. The metallic rotting smell that feels like it has rooted itself in his lungs and refuses to leave. He wants to empty his stomach in the bushes to his left, but can’t bring himself to move and instead forces the nausea back.

He failed. He failed. He failed and they have more important things to worry about than the missing—dead he thinks—heiress he had been tracking down. A terrorist like plot is more pressing than a solved case that ended with a dead young woman in a motel tub, decaying beyond recognition with the help of the maid's cleaning solutions.

The woman in the group, Naomi, is standing a few yards away from him, a look on her face that isn't quite sympathy, but still manages to convey that she knows. Knows that the remains they found meant something to him. That hurts almost as much as finding Julie.

But she’s standing next to him, Julie, only there in his mind. A scowl on her face as if reprimanding him for his desire to curl into a ball of liquor-fueled despair. She was fighting this. Fighting for peace. Trying to make more of a difference than he ever did in all his years on the force. It’s the least he could do to continue. To find who did this to her and to make them pay. He'll make sure of it.

 

~

 

They find the Protogen group locked away in some industrial building sitting beside the canal that feeds into almost every water source the county uses. A bunch of wide-eyed and morally bankrupt scientists being led by a man who can't seem to see the error in killing millions.

And the man just won't shut up.

He's never really been into action movies and villains who steeple their fingers, but he figures this guy, this Antony Dresden, is the kind of guy they were meant to emulate. He's been rambling about how they were doing what needed to be done. For science. For Humanity. Comparing himself to Genghis Khan out of anyone else in history he could choose. Hitler would have been a better comparison.

In reality, the man is a sociopath. He's murdered thousands. He murdered Julie. Maybe he wasn't the one to pull the trigger or plant the chemical bombs that took over the small city they just barely managed to escape after finding Julie, but he's the one who started it. Antony's responsible. And looking around him, Miller can see he's starting to make sense, even a little, to those around him.

A man like that doesn't deserve to live. Doesn't deserve the chance to make up for his sins, or worse, make others think those sins were the right thing to do. There's too much red to ever wash away in his lifetime.

It just takes one shot and he's on the ground, blood spattered against the concrete, Holden shouting at him as he fires off couple unnecessary rounds into his chest for good measure.

Holden's a good guy. He's learned at least that much in the month they've been unofficially working together. But Holden gives people too much credit. He can't seem to grasp the concept that some people just need to be put down to make the world right again. As right as it can be made after they've tried to break it.

Some people don't deserve a trial.

He can barely remember a time when he would have thought the same.

 

~

 

The place is swarming with officers, real ones hired by the government instead of the group Johnson put together to infiltrate the building. The crime scene is getting bagged and tagged, Dresden's body zipped into a plastic bag, ready to be carted off like the garbage he is, and the electronics are being gathered up for evidence. The scientists have been herded against a wall so their statements and information can be taken down before they are shoved into a van and taken to lock up.

The scientists have been herded against a wall so their statements and information can be taken down before they are shoved into a van and taken to lock up. They look like they've been caught trying to buy beer with a fake ID. Passive. As if trying to cultivate a super virus that could be used for militant means was no big deal. Like testing it on unsuspecting humans and leaving them to die and infect others was just a means to an end.

Except for one.

He stands towards the end of the group, waiting like the others, for an officer to take his information, but his eyes are darting around the room, never staying in one spot for long. Every couple of minutes his eyes land on a door in the corner.

Miller watches him for several minutes, trying to figure out what has got this one in particular so riled up.

When the man makes eye contact, looks to Dresden's Body, then to the door, it all comes together.

Miller stands and makes his way across the room, keeping his eyes on the jittery scientist as he starts to pick up on where he's headed. Every step taken makes the scientist shake just a little bit more, and with only a few steps left to take, he breaks from the line, yelling about a quarantine and not to open the door.

That's when he knows, somehow, that something important is behind the door.

The door opens easily enough and Miller stumbles down the stone steps in his hurry to get to the bottom. It's the basement of the building, stone built walls with small windows dotting the top. The sound of water dripping in the distance. The sunlight reflecting off the water of the canal sends waves of light splashing onto every surface. He circles around taking in the room and the rows of blue plastic portable quarantine rooms large enough for a medical bed and equipment. It isn't until he hears the hum and beep of a machine towards the farthest wall, nestled up against a window, that he realizes there is someone alive down here.

He moves slowly, unsure of what he will find.

There's a voice in his head, trying desperately to convince him that he should be running. Should high-tail it out of Dodge. But the figure on the other side of the plastic reminds him of the girl that haunted his waking hours and reminded him there were still people in the world who gave a shit how it ended.

He can hear Holden coming down the stairs.

Life hadn't been worth living for a while now. Hadn't much felt like a life at all. He needs to know, this last time...

Before Holden can tell him to stop, Miller has the zipper to the room open and is stepping inside, making sure to close it behind him so no one else gets infected.

And there she is.

The blue waves of light coming in through the window and blue give the room the feeling of an underwater grotto, while the machinery connected to Julie Mao gave the faint glow of life. In the middle of the room sits the bed on which she lay, hair splayed out around her face. If he looked closely he could see her chest, covered with a thin blue sheet, rise and fall with shallow breaths.

_A mermaid in the deep_ , he thinks as he rounds the bed to be at her side.

All this time. All this way. And here was what he'd come for.

There is a stool to the side of the equipment that he pulls close to sit next to her, and he looks her over. It's not good, dis-colorization dotting her skin and her breathing labored, but she's alive.

He picks up her hand from where it lays on the sheet to her side, taking in the cool moistness of her skin and the patches where the virus has started to eat away.

“-Miller! Naomi's got the CDC on the pho—” He looks up from her hand, back to the doorway to see a blue Holden standing there with a look of forced calm on his face as he talks, words that Miller has no interest in unless it means Julie lives. Just beyond he can make out Amos pinning someone to the wall, one of the scientists, face close and grunting at them.

“Just make sure they get to Julie first.” Finding her here, alive, makes the thought of living life a little more bearable to live, but even though he isn't as intent on dying anymore doesn't mean he won't gladly give his life for hers.

 

~

 

It takes the CDC three hours to get everything together and out to them. In that time he doesn't let go of Julie's hand. Holden won't leave the basement, alternating between trying to give Miller forced hope that the scientists upstairs being scared straight by Amos and Fred are going to come up with the antidote none of them had bothered to try to come up with before now, and telling him what an idiot he is.

An hour in, they manage to get a couple bottles of water into the room. He knows he needs the water, can feel the effects of the virus starting to spread through his body, but it's not until Julie wakes, coughing up a sick looking substance, that Miller even bothers opening one up. He gently coaxes her into taking a couple small sips—water's good for when you're sick, right?—and helps straighten the pillows underneath her head, trying to make her as comfortable as possible given her weak state.

“Wh-who are you?” Her voice is scratchy despite the water, and her eyes fluttering while taking in his face.

“Name's Miller. I was assigned to find you.”

“Find m...” Her voice trails off as looks of recognition and irritation fly over her face before she scowls at him. “You're one of those bastard CPD officers, aren't you?”

“Not anymore, I'm not,” he can't help but laugh bitterly before coughing. “And I'm trying to do better now.”

She's silent for a moment, getting her bearings. Taking in the blue room around her.

“Where am I?” Her eyes are now darting all over the room, from the wires connected to her body to the machinery to the pacing people outside the plastic walls. He can hear her breath hitch and her body tense as much as anyone in her weakened state could. “Where am I?”

“Hey, don't be scared, okay?" He keeps his voice soft. "It's all right. In a really screwed up way, but help is coming. You're going to be all right.”

She falls back to sleep not long after and he can feel Holden staring at them through the blue. He's still, no longer pacing, watching as Miller strokes her hand some more, giving the back a firm kiss, never taking his eyes off her.

“Don't worry. We're gonna be fine.”

 

~

 

It takes a two weeks for him to recover fully inside a quarantined room at the hospital. They don't spend much time worrying about him. The symptoms had just barely started to show by the time the CDC got to him. They were more worried about Julie, on the verge of organ failure by the time the first vaccine had been tested.

After that, well, he kinda wishes he were still in the hospital.

The official inquiry into what had happened with the Canterbury and the town with the motel and the Protogen offices takes up his waking hours after his release. An official government inquiry and the arrest of Jules-Pierre Mao fill the news cycles. And a month after his release he receives the official paperwork from the department about his firing, as if they hadn't been clear enough the first time around, and a request for him to come clean out his desk and locker, along with a to-do by date.

Just to spite them, he wait's until the very last day,

 

~

 

There are few in the department who are genuinely sad to see him go.

He picks up his old hat, twisting it between his fingers before dropping it in the small box they had given him to put his personal effects in when they kicked him out the door. He saved the girl but lost the job. _It’s a fair trade_ , he thinks with a small smirk.

“Josephus Miller?”

His head snaps up. It’s her voice. The voice from the videos and from the sick woman on the verge of death in the basement of a once abandoned building. She’s in front of him and more than real. He has no need for visions anymore.

She's wearing the metal beaded necklace he had taken from her apartment all those months ago.

“Mill-” he clears his throat roughly. He twitches where he stands. “Miller. They call me Miller.”

It's been three months since he'd seen her loaded into a helicopter to be whisked away. She looks better. Her skin's still pale, her face a little gaunt, her walk slower. She's still beautiful, even frowning. Even carrying the aura of someone who has been through the worst thing they will ever face.

“I'm sorry about your sister.” When he had realized Julie was still alive he hadn't taken the time to think about the identity of the body they found in that bathroom. The reporters can't seem to forget.

“Clarissa was....I shouldn't have left her alone with my father and his ranting. I should have kept in touch with her. Made sure she was okay....” Julie gives the bull pit a quick glance, looking out of place against the dingy background of industrialized peacekeeping. Her eyes land on the box on his desk.

“Are you leaving?”

“Yeah." He runs a nervous hand through his hair. "Turns out the higher ups aren't too keen to forgive when you keep pursuing a case they've only given you because it kept you off cases they actually wanted solving.”

She smiles. Seeing it in person is even more of a revelation than he thought it would be. Her eyes are understanding and kind, but they seem to see right through him. The uptick of her brow gives away her amusement of the situation.

“Sounds like you need a drink.” Her head tilts down and her smile turns to a smirk, then her eyes rise up to meet his. It's innocent, means nothing, but his breath still catches at the sight. “Would this case they didn't want solving be able to buy an ex-bastard cop a drink to say thanks for saving her life?”

He grabs his jacket and then the box, giving her a smirk of his own, not yet trusting life to give him a gift like her company enough to smile.

“Lead the way.”

They're in the lobby when she speaks up next, grabbing the hat from the top of the box.

“Nice hat.” Her tone is mocking, but still kind and open, if a little uneasy, rough from being sick. It’s meant to ease, not judge.

She’s really here. She’s real beside him and smiling at him and talking to him. Other people can see her. Now he has the chance to really get to know her as more than the woman in his head. More than her pictures or the files on her computer or her angry e-mails to her parents. And, god, does he want to get to know her in any way she will let him.

He moves the box under one arm and holds open the door to let her through, looking her in the eye with something close to hope.

“Keeps my head dry.”

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Ending with a spark of something possible felt best on this one. Hopefully, I can go a bit farther than hope on my next fic for these two. And don't get me wrong, I love Clarissa, but I needed a way for him still think she was still dead.  
> Come see me in my [trashcan](http://www.nourgelitnius.tumblr.com) if you're so inclined.  
> Comments fuel my soul.


End file.
